Category Archives: personal work

We’d like to thank each one of our three million readers for following us throughout the years, and wish to all of them a fruitful New Year. Ideas are what we wish them to find under the Christmas tree. That’s the best gift they can get because creativity, through constant effort, passion, hard work and inspiration, is what makes this world ... Read More »

Nietzsche said that philosophers or moralists who try to escape decadence by opposing it, they become – in the end – its most powerful promoters. We agree, and complaining about the times we live in is an act of decadence. This essay casts a look at decadence from another angle: Poetry. What is Landscape With Logo? First of ... Read More »

A small factory specialized in high quality beauty & make up products based in Oregon, asked us to develop a new name and a brand identity addressing the young American affluent. We proposed Sottinteso, an Italian word that stands in between “understood” and “it goes without saying”. This name convey a sense of complicity and intimacy between ... Read More »

This is a first in wallpaper design. It was commissioned to us by Klockner&Plintz, to celebrate its 100th anniversary. It’s called “Carta da Parate” (a pun between parade and parete, the Italian word for wall), and it’s printed with natural, vivid colors on recycled, extra heavy, washable paper. This design, initially thought as a temporary wallpaper decoration ... Read More »

We are spending a lot of money every year to advertise against the ivory trade and the gruesome massacre of African elephants. We love elephants and we would like to contribute to the cause with a simple, cost effective idea. Instead of new media, we thought of an old media. Probably one of the oldest one, since the ... Read More »

LET’S KILL CRUELTY and execute massive stupidity! This is our call. Is the message too aggressive? Is it going to annoy the people who take pleasure in shooting at wild animals? Isn’t it politically correct? Frankly, we don’t care. Brandpowder’s view on this issue points straight through the rifle’s scope. Communication focuses on target, right? Well, we ... Read More »

Photography, photographed N°7. This time we present a brief essay, with snapshots taken from hotel magazines. The eye of Lily Rose Depp – Chanel’s latest testimonial – breaks in the page, lacerating the skin of its former muse, Gisele Bundchen. Success has always a successors. Broken eyes and broken hearts. What is left? A glass bottle, shattered crystals, crumpled paper. ... Read More »

We just started our atelier in culture hybridization. It’s called Crossbooks. We have picked 1,000 books and we are now arranging them in a spatial metaphor. Then we’ll create maps of titles, with unexpected trails connecting one another. Books, according to Borges, are linked together by invisible threads. Our research, though, doesn’t consider the content but just ... Read More »

Narcissism is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes. The term originated from Greek Mythology where the young Narcissus fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water. That’s the definition we found on Wikipedia and we won’t go any deeper. Interestingly enough, no subject invites ... Read More »

Last spring Brandpowder was contacted by Marco Mavilla, an Italian fashion guru who has carved a special niche in Italian glamour, stirring the market with his irreverent creations. He was the founder – and master mind – of Toywatch, a small firm he was able to turn into a 30-million dollar business in less than five years. Brandpowder, throughout ... Read More »

HOW MANY TIMES did we read that? – the same line, again and again, printed on tabloids and online blogs. We all love this kind of bullshit, don’t we? It’s part of today’s mythology, after all. We want to believe that Elvis is alive because rock stars have replaced old gods. The word “cult” is applied more to pop than religion. People worship Elvis as an ... Read More »

Advertising is trying to sell you all sort of stuff, and the more useless it is, the more indispensable it seems. So you keep buying hundreds of products that pile up in your house and, soon enough, you barely find a free square foot where to sit. This attitude usually degenerates into a disease called ... Read More »

The exhibition took place in San Francisco last week, late spring 2016. We were able to publish the book on time, too, which is quite unusual for us, due to the endemic disorder of our office and the lack of a proper press editor. The title of the book is, simply put, INK. It collects 250 portraits made ... Read More »

Dear Readers, Big Data recently exploited people’s narcissism by personalizing all sort of products with their name in place of the usual logo. To comment this marketing trend is futile. We wanted, instead, to publish a story about a guy called Peter, obsessed with his name. We hope you’ll enjoy it. And if you’re called Peter, drop us ... Read More »

Brandpowder already published a few essays on the broken picture : you can see them on Paper Surgery and Photography Photographed, for instance. This time we wanted to explore the topic from a new angle, exploring image manipulation from different sources. The new Millennium witnessed a passage from the culture of pictures to the cult of pics. The ... Read More »

This time we decided to publish some of Brandpowder’s projects which never saw the light of day. Well, most of our work barely sees the sun because our staff works mostly overnight. This work, it must be said, was not rejected by clients. It wasn’t even presented simply because judged not good enough by our designers. Above: a poster for ... Read More »

We thought we had seen it all and then – Bang! – The Volkswagen’s scandal! The gem of Germany industry unmasked by a tricky software. This smart program switched on when the automobiles were being tested for compliance with EPA standards, turning off during normal driving to allow maximum engine performance. The devilish idea was ... Read More »

Let’s admit it: we all have our skeletons in the closet! And if you agree on this simple piece of forensic, metaphoric evidence, you can’t dissent with the fact we all need a closet to store them. Would you place, for example, your skeletons in the same spot where you keep your clean underwear? Certainly not. ... Read More »